But yeah, I guess the hallucinations are all symbolic of something. The mobsters, for example, can’t be reasoned with. The henchmen carry out the orders of a shadowy don who never has to get his hands dirty. My neighborhood is as far away from the Italian Mafia as the moon, yet when I see them, they don’t feel foreign. They feel like they fit in. They’re like the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, annoying little henchmen who say things like “yeah, boss” in a loud, nasally voice.
Every now and then, I’ll get a different hallucination, something that I haven’t seen before, and that’s when I have to be careful, because there’s a small chance that they are not a hallucination at all—just a new person I’ve never seen before. So I wait for the signs. The strange eye color. The weird voice. The fact that no one else can see them when they do something odd. That’s actually the only reason I knew that the old lady in the tracksuit running down our street was a hallucination. She did backflips in our driveway. The couple pushing their stroller across the street didn’t even look up, and I’m almost positive they were real.
—
I’m not sure if this is a side effect of the drug, so I’ll tell you what happened, and you can tell me.
St. Agatha’s has a pool. Boys and girls aren’t allowed to use it at the same time because swimsuits are provocative and inspire horny teenagers to have impure thoughts. I’d like to tell them that these thoughts would exist regardless of the swimsuits, but whatever. This week we were split into groups and told to swim laps.
I didn’t think it was possible to hate anything more than running, but I will say this: I actually am a lot more motivated to keep swimming since the alternative is drowning at the bottom of a pool that everybody probably pees in.
I popped my head out of the water just long enough to see Ian swimming a few lanes over from me. I hate to admit it, but he is an excellent swimmer. He finished his laps before anyone else and spent the rest of the class sitting on the edge of the pool, watching everyone with a superior look on his face. He wrinkled his nose in Dwight’s direction, emphasizing his usual arrogant glance. Granted, Dwight was swimming as awkwardly as humanly possible and was the only one in the water wearing nose plugs and bright blue goggles. But I bet Ian would have looked at him like that anyway.
So here’s the part I need your help with. I get that my hallucinations aren’t the most trustworthy people, but sometimes I feel like they’re trying to tell me something I can’t see on my own. Does that even make sense?
I was the last one in the locker room, and I’d just finished getting dressed when I heard a splash. Rebecca, who had been sitting cross-legged on a bench waiting for me to leave, bolted out of the room. I don’t mean that she was running in a circle or darting between lockers toward the door. She actually took off sprinting toward the pool, and since this had never happened before, I followed her.
The pool was empty except for one thrashing body tangled in the floating swimming lanes. I didn’t have my specs on, but whoever it was, they clearly couldn’t swim. So I jumped in. I figured if it turned out that this wasn’t real, the worst that could happen was I got wet.
Trying to save someone from drowning is not as glamorous as it sounds. Once I’d gotten close enough to actually help them, I was rewarded with a swift kick in the face by someone desperately struggling to stay afloat.
“Stop moving!” I yelled.
“Why? So I can drown faster?” It was Maya.
“No,” I panted, tasting the blood that was now dripping from my nose. “So I can grab you and pull you to the side.”
She was hesitant to leave the safety of the swim lanes, but eventually I managed to pull her off and swim us both to the ladder on the edge of the pool. She climbed out and threw up over the drain.
“You can’t swim?” I asked, taking deep breaths. She glared at me for stating the obvious. “Okay,” I said. “Any reason you were in here to begin with?”
She pointed at the stack of clipboards near the door. “Coach Russert asked me to come get them since I’d be passing the athletics office on my way to English,” she said.
“And you decided to go for a swim?” I asked. My nose was bleeding pretty heavily at this point, but she continued to glare at me.
She pointed at a fallen tower of safety vests and breathed, “I tripped.”
It got awkward pretty quickly after that. We both realized at exactly the same time that we were both soaking wet lying on the floor of the pool room, next to a puddle of Maya’s vomit, while blood poured steadily out of my nose. The good thing is I think the awkwardness softened her.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, pointing at my face.
“It’s okay,” I said. Actually, it was not okay. It hurt like hell, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
We both stood up and shuffled in place for a minute. In the movies when this sort of thing happens, it’s usually followed by a dramatic love scene or, at the very least, an undying pledge of friendship. But we both just stared at each other until finally she said, “Thanks for saving my life,” which is a lot less dramatic when someone actually says it than Disney would have you believe.
“You’re welcome,” I said. For a split second, I saw her smile and the effect was stunning. I didn’t get to enjoy it, though. She bolted through the door to the girls’ locker room, leaving me there to wonder what the hell just happened.
Did I run to the sound of the splash when she fell in? Or did I follow Rebecca when she ran?
Does that even matter?
—
My first confession at St. Agatha’s was this past Friday after mass. All the grades take turns going, which still amazes me because of how much time the whole process takes. It’s like an hour and forty-five minutes of waiting for your turn. Five minutes with the priest and then five minutes kneeling afterward. That’s a lot of time that probably could be spent learning stuff.
I’d grown up Catholic, but I’d only ever gone once before, when I was about eight years old, because that’s the age kids typically are for their first confession. Needless to say, there had been nothing to confess. Eight-year-olds don’t get up to much. But I felt guilty, so I told the priest some stuff I felt guilty about, and he seemed satisfied with that.
I can’t understand why anyone would feel compelled to tell a complete stranger all their sins (as I sit here and tell you all my problems). More importantly, I don’t believe for a second that anyone actually does it.
You just make up a bunch of stuff while you wait in line.
This makes me wonder about how other people feel guilt. Because I think I’m doing it wrong. I don’t generally feel guilty about the things I do—I feel guilty for NOT feeling guilty about the things I do. Like yesterday. I had a full internal monologue about how I would give away my schizophrenia if I could. I thought about choosing someone who deserved it and how great I would feel after I gave it to them, knowing that it didn’t belong to me anymore.
I would feel the most wonderful sense of relief, and for a brief second I would be happy to think that I could cast my problems off on someone else. Then I would feel guilty for not feeling guilty about it. Because that pretty much makes me an awful person, right?